Free This One Time With Julia by David Lampson Page B

shaking her head out the window, I got this very strong feeling that she didn’t want me to come with her to Tennessee anymore, that I’d have to spend the rest of my life in this cornfield, or else go back to Los Angeles and beg Marcus to let me back in his apartment one last time. But then slowly her expression changed. I could see her whole body relax, and now she seemed more curious than anything else.
    “How do you do that?” she asked me.
    “What?”
    “You’re so calm. Alvin was never this calm. Were you just born this way?”
    “I can’t remember.”
    “The strangest part is that I feel it’s actually contagious. It’s a nice way to live. You just drive the car until it stops working. You don’t even care why. Then you just sit and wait for the next thing to happen.”
    “You’re making fun of me.”
    “I’m not. I’m really not. In fact, I want you to teach me. And you must have a pretty calming effect on me too, because the old Julia would be totally freaking out right now. I can see why people like you, like Marcus says. You just float along. No matter what happens, you take everything in stride. We’re in the middle of a cornfield, totally out of gas, and it barely affects you at all. How do you manage not to stress out about this?”
    “I don’t even have to think about it.”
    “I always worry about everything. So what’s your secret? How do you handle this situation, for example? Do you start walking to a gas station? Do we wait to get randomly rescued by a stranger? Do we just sit here until we starve to death? Am I asking all the wrong questions?”
    “I guess we should start walking,” I said.
    We got out of the car and walked along the grassy shoulder of the road. About an hour later we finally found a gas station, and I took out some money from an ATM, and bought this little can of gas, and also a Skor bar, and some milk. While we were walking back, Julia asked me, “Is it true what Marcus said? Can you really not read?”
    “I could read if I wanted to.”
    “I promise it doesn’t bother me at all. I just want to know. Actually I think it’s interesting. I never met anyone our age who couldn’t read.”
    “You should see my signature,” I said. “The handwriting is really very good.”
    “You can’t, then.”
    “Not yet.”
    “This is so unbelievable. I just have no idea what I’m doing. What on earth is happening to me?” She balled up her fists and screamed silently up at the sky. “I’m getting a crush on a boy who can’t read.”
    It took me a few seconds to realize what Julia had just said. I’d had crushes on other people before, but this crush was on me, and I could feel it washing through my whole body. I can remember how nervous and excited my stomach was, like I was constantly about to burst out laughing. Most of all I felt lucky, like I’d hit an impossible shot, or drawn an impossible card. Everything was different between us from that moment on. For the rest of the day, we switched drivers every few hours, and I watched the gas light carefully at all times. Julia would sort of lean into me once in a while, and it started to feel like we’d been doing this forever.
    I found out the country doesn’t really change too much as you are driving through it in a car, at least not as much as I thought it would. The restaurants we saw at the end were mostly the same as the ones we saw at the beginning, and I was happy to find out there was going to be a McDonald’s every fifteen miles the whole way. At the first one we stopped at, I asked the manager if she knew Francisco. I just wanted to know if he’d finally kissed Carmen, but I saw that I’d only confused her.
    “You’re ridiculous,” said Julia afterward. “How is she supposed to know who any of those people are? But on the other hand—” She frowned, and started rubbing her temples. “What do I know? I’m no expert. Who am I to judge? Who am I to say McDonald’s employees don’t all know